The Power Of Now - enlightenment
Emotional energy booster 1: Stop buying into someone elses expectations for you
Diagnostic Question 1: Do you often feel angry with someone important to you because that person tells you how you should live your life? Do you feel that people are disappointed in you? Do you live in fear of other people’s judgments of you?
Then say something like this to yourself: “I understand what this person expects. But I don’t expect that for myself. I’m sorry if he or she is disappointed, but I have to make sure my top priority is that I live up to my own expectations.” This is a personal declaration of independence. It’s for you to know. And that’s all. You don’t have to go to that person and have a confrontation. You don’t ever have to tell them.
Emotional energy booster 2: Take responsibility for finding meaning in your life
Diagnostic Question 2: Did you have a sense of meaning at some point in your life that you no longer have to the same degree? Is there a staleness or an emptiness in your life now that bothers you?
If you wait for the universe to give you a sense of meaning, you’ll be frustrated, and it will spoil your relationship with life and with yourself. But if you take responsibility for finding a sense of meaning, or even finding a way to live without it, that’s your way of seeing that the universe is a place of abundance, where you can find meaning if you’re willing to look for it.
The rabbi understood that if the meaning of life is to enjoy life, it’s even better if you enjoy it with someone else. If this solution is right for you, you only need to let yourself do it. It can be hard to find meaning. So why exhaust yourself trying to find meaning in your life when you find enormous energy by stopping the search?
The principle here is that when your house gets blown down, you build it up again, and if it keeps getting blown down, you keep building it up. You have meaning as long as you keep struggling.
Your emotional energy doesn’t care about how successful you are in worldly terms. Your emotional energy only cares about how successful you are at
Another straightforward solution to the issue of meaning is to think about what you care about and then do something about it. That’s all meaning is: caring plus a network of actions that ties your life to what you care about. No matter what it is, no matter how tiny or insignificant it may seem to others, if your caring is real and if you do things to bring your caring into the fabric of your everyday life, you will feel a sense of meaning return.
Without meaning, there’s no real reason or reward for what you do. And if you do something for no reason and with no hope of reward, how in the world is that supposed to energize you?
A kid wants to do what he wants to do the way he wants to do it. But adults want kids to do what they want kids to do, and to do it the right way. So the transition from childhood to adulthood is marked by adults giving children the message that they’re not okay the way they are. There’s something wrong with what they want and with the ways they do things. This is what you and I and every other kid has had to deal with. We accept the demands adults make on us growing up. But it has a terrible impact on our emotional energy to be constantly told that there’s something wrong with us for being ourselves.
Identify what you’ve had taken away from you. Then help someone else find something like that. That’s the basic principle.
The meaning of your life comes from simply living your life. It sounds like a paradox, but it really isn’t. You can enjoy life without any sense of meaning beyond simply enjoying life. You enjoy the moment. You enjoy what you find pleasure in.
Watching people struggle to find meaning in their lives, I found that there are many solutions that work. One of them will be right for you. For example, when’s the last time you asked yourself, “What is something I could do, or do differently, that would give me more meaning in my life?” This basic question is an excellent way to begin. All you have to do is answer as best you can and then do your best to carry out your answer. You don’t need to come up with a brilliant answer. Just by asking it, you reorient your entire being in such a way that you immediately get more emotional energy.
Emotional energy booster 3: When you pray, have a real dialogue with God and talk to Him about the ways in which you’d like to be a better person
Diagnostic Question 3: When you pray, does it give you a measurable boost? And do you typically turn to prayer specifically to feel better, happier, more alive?
I’m not going to get into the theology of whether God literally answers prayers or not. But it’s an incontrovertible finding of objective research that prayer makes people feel better. It does in fact give you emotional energy.
Emotional energy booster 4: Wherever you can in your life, do things your own way
Diagnostic Question 4: Are you happy with how much you there is in your life?
Here’s what to do. Spend a few days going through your life with the phrase “If it were up to me …” in your head. What would you do differently if it were up to you what you had on your wall at work? If it were up to you how you spoke to clients or colleagues? If it were up to you how you dressed? If it were up to you how you did your job? If it were up to you what jobs or clients you took on? If it were up to you how you dealt with people in your family? If it were up to you how you spent your leisure time?
Whatever you do, and however you think about it, you should be feeling that what you’re doing is working with and for the energy of the universe. If not, do something different.
Think about how you do something. Brushing your teeth, for example. You probably do it your own way. The way you’re used to doing it. By now it’s so easy to do it that way that you don’t even think about it. Now suppose someone gave you rules for a completely different way of brushing your teeth. Maybe using a different hand. Or maybe using a different motion of the toothbrush. It would be harder for you. It would take more time and energy. Not just physical energy, but a kind of mental energy because you’d have to pay attention in a whole new way. It’s like that with everything. Your way is the easy way. The natural way. The way that fits you. It takes the least energy from you. Now suppose we’re talking about doing something much more important than brushing your teeth. Something you really care about. When you do it your way, it not only takes the least energy from you, it also gives you the most energy. We get energy from being ourselves. We quite literally turn ourselves on.
If you keep asking how you would do this and that differently “if it were up to me,” I promise that you’ll find countless pockets of freedom, as I call them. You’ll be surprised at how many opportunities there are in your life for you to do it your way. Maybe you didn’t bother looking for these pockets of freedom. Maybe you knew they were there but for some reason you held yourself back from taking the opportunity to do things your own way.
But when you personalize your life, when you make your life a place where you can be yourself, when you do things the way you want to do them, your life feels like your home. And that is a tremendous source of emotional energy.
Emotional energy booster 5: Give yourself energy by visualizing yourself having emotional energy
Diagnostic Question 5: Are you in the habit of visualizing yourself living your life with emotional energy?
You just need to see yourself coping and dealing in a new energetic way. I understand. Right now you may not feel you have all that much energy. But you’re going to visualize what you’d do if you had tons. Don’t worry. You’re not under any obligation. The next day, having done all this wonderful visualization, you don’t have to act in any particular way. You just have to do your best.
The key wasn’t visualizing the moment of success. It was visualizing yourself doing a good job dealing with whatever you had to deal with. You can probably guess where I’m going with this. It turns out, much to my surprise, that people with emotional energy visualized themselves having a lot of energy.
Emotional energy booster 6: Do something new
Diagnostic Question 6: Do you do something really new at least once a month?
Here’s the problem, and I’m as guilty as most. First, we’re busy. Second, we’ve created a good-enough routine and we’re reluctant to shake it up. Third, we’ve tried new things in the past and they haven’t always worked out. Fourth, we don’t quite know what new things to do. I’ve made these excuses myself. This is a way most of us are pretty conservative. And so we get stuck. We need to do something new. But we feel we can’t.
The key, I’ve learned, is this: If you wouldn’t ordinarily do it, it’s new enough for you. Eat a new food. Eat an old food prepared in a new way. Drive home a new way. Wear socks that are a new color for you. Do one new thing the next time you have sex. Go to the bookstore and buy a new kind of book. Listen to a new kind of music. Go to the florist and ask them to put together a little bouquet with some new and exotic flowers.
So here’s what to do when your emotional energy suddenly crashes:
- Buy yourself something that you find beautiful or uplifting or delightful. Or ask someone who cares about you to buy you something like this.
- If your emotional energy has crashed, your physical energy needs to help you out. So immediately do things to take care of your physical energy.
- Throw yourself into your work.
- Immediately do little things you know will make you happy.
- Find someone smart that you trust, and talk to this person about your emotional energy collapse—why it happened, what you can do for yourself right now, why you should feel hopeful about the future.
- Have appropriate expectations for yourself right now.
- Give yourself some solitude.
- Identify what you’re afraid of.
- Take one small step toward making your life better.
Emotional energy booster 7: Always have something special to look forward to
Diagnostic Question 7: Do you have the same feeling that there are wonderful things to look forward to now that you did as a kid?
The key is your sense of anticipation. You don’t even have to actually do the thing you’re looking forward to. Just the fact that you have something to look forward to, somewhere in the future, is enough. Of course it can’t feel too remote. It’s got to feel doable in the not-too-distant future.
When it comes to the body, we know that people don’t exercise because they’re healthy. People are healthy because they exercise. Energy is all about what you do, not who you are. So in the same way, people don’t feel they have things to look forward to because they have emotional energy. People have emotional energy because they give themselves things to look forward to.
Emotional energy booster 8: Make some days less serious
Diagnostic Question 8: Would you say that there’s really not much fun in your everyday life?
Just say to yourself: “Today, I’ll be just a little less serious, a little less obsessively goal-oriented. I’ll try to have a little more fun doing whatever I do.”
The following week at the beginning of every session I said: “Let’s have some fun today.” I couldn’t believe the enormous difference it made. The sessions with the no-fun intro were blah. The sessions with the fun intro had more commitment, involvement, and creativity. Emotional energy was much higher when fun was expected.
Emotional energy booster 9: Bad things have happened to all of us, but don’t let your loss define you
Diagnostic Question 9: Would you say, “I rarely go more than a couple of days without having feelings about one of the losses, regrets, or missed opportunities in my life”?
Whatever the truth of your past, the truth of your future is that anyone who can’t let go of loss after a reasonable amount of time is in trouble and needs help. That’s because when the sense of loss lingers past its expiration date, it starts to stink up the joint. If the sense of loss doesn’t depart all by itself, you have to kick it out, or else you’ll be dragged down by it. You can’t have emotional energy unless you get rid of your sense of loss.
Route one. Look at whatever losses, grievances, or regrets you’ve been carrying around, and try to let them go. This is the most direct route. Tell yourself that enough is enough. Tell yourself that the time for mourning, the time for living in the past, is over. Most of all tell yourself, “Yes, something bad happened to me. But this bad thing isn’t who I am. I’m not going to let myself be defined by my hurts. And if my loss isn’t me, I really don’t have to pay attention to it anymore.
Route two. One reason people have trouble letting go of loss is that they’ve never gone through a real mourning process, and that can cause a drain of emotional energy. If only they could mourn their loss properly once and for all, then they could let it go and move on. I’m not talking about complaining. You can’t dribble it out. You’ve got to go for the whole shebang.
Route three. This brings you to a fork in the road. If you couldn’t let go and mourning hasn’t worked, you have an important choice. Hanging on to loss cripples your emotional energy. So if you still can’t let go of your loss, you should face the fact that your hanging on is not about the size of your loss at all. It’s about your unwillingness to embrace life. Why else would someone hold on to a shadow? So here’s your choice. You can give yourself a good talking-to, and here’s what you have to tell yourself: Everyone has had bad things happen to them. If you hold on to it, you’re perpetuating the damage, and there’s no wisdom in that. It doesn’t matter what terrible loss or injury happened to you. I would never want to minimize what happened. But one thing I know for sure. Whatever happened is in the past. You can’t change the past. No one can change the past. If your foot was blown off by a land mine, if you were raped, if you lost all your money, if you lost your family in an accident— yes, these were terrible things, but by holding on to that memory and keeping it fresh you join in perpetuating the damage with whatever or whoever did that to you. It’s a form of double victimization. First you’re victimized by whatever bad thing happened to you. Then you victimize yourself by keeping it alive within yourself.
The other fork in the road is going into therapy.
Emotional energy booster 10: Never envy anyone
Diagnostic Question 10: Do you feel one down compared to others? Do you have a sense of missing out in your life? Would you say that you frequently compare yourself to others and feel resentful?
One of the worst parts of envy, and one of the reasons it can be so deadly to our emotional energy, is the way it ambushes us. We’re going along just fine, and suddenly we’re talking to a friend over lunch and she makes some comment that flattens us. Let’s say she talks about how when she got sick her boyfriend took such good care of her. That’s not such a big deal. But when we got sick, the important person in our lives didn’t take such good care of us. Instant envy. Instant emotional exhaustion.
Be aware of all the ways you’re pricked by envy.
Know that envy is bad for your health.
Realize that envy is mostly an exercise in ignorance. You know how messy and complicated your life is from the inside. That person you’re envying—all you know about his life is from the outside. You don’t know about his frustrations. You don’t know about his pain. You don’t know about the disasters he’s standing on the precipice of. The chances are you’re envying someone whose life you wouldn’t want if you got it.
Count your blessings. We’ve heard this so many times we forget how important it is. It’s an enormously powerful entrée to more emotional energy.
Emotional energy booster 11: Let go of guilt
Diagnostic Question 11: Try to think of something you feel very guilty about. Is it easy for you to come up with something?
If paying for your crime doesn’t make sense, let your guilt go—why feel guilty if there’s nothing to pay for? If you really are responsible for doing something bad, then you’ve got to pay for it—but why feel guilty if you’re paying for what you did? Either way the burden of guilt will drop away.
I’ve learned that you can’t help anyone get rid of guilt unless they want to get rid of it. As crazy as it sounds, some people just like feeling guilty. It makes them feel important without actually having to do anything important. It makes them feel alive without having to participate in life. It’s a way to quit, and so it’s perfect for quitters. Let’s face it, there are people who don’t want more emotional energy. Their view is that it’s better to live a small life with little energy than a big life with a lot of energy. But if you’re a real energy seeker, you have to look at the issue of guilt in your life.
What you’re going to do is basically put yourself on trial. Right here. Right now. At the end of the process you’ll have clarity and, one way or another, an end to your feeling of guilt. First step. Did you actually commit a crime, not necessarily in the strict legal sense but in the human sense? After all, there’s no need to proceed to sentencing if you can’t be held responsible for committing any crime.
Then ask yourself if you were really responsible. You’re certainly not responsible if you didn’t do anything wrong. Lots of people feel guilty because bad things happened to people they care about. Maybe they failed to prevent the bad thing from happening. But they probably couldn’t have prevented it. For example, if you’re in a relationship with someone who messes up his life, why should you feel guilty unless you put a gun to his head and made him mess up his life? And you’re not responsible if you were doing the best you could for a person of your age and background.
And you’re not guilty if you were under duress.
And it’s not a crime at all if nothing all that bad really happened. Did someone really suffer as a result of what you did? You broke up with someone. The other person was hurt. But come on, people get dumped all the time.
And it’s not a crime if all you did was a perfectly normal thing that people typically do in those situations. Does that apply to you? You goofed off in college, let’s say. That’s a shame, but you were twenty years old, for goodness’ sake. People that age do that.
Second step. If you did something that amounts to a real crime, you have to stand up and plead guilty. You know the truth. You know if you actually did something you shouldn’t have done that actually hurt someone. If so, now the trial proceeds to the penalty phase. Now you have to do something meaningful to compensate for that crime. If you specifically hurt another person, repay that person. If that person can’t be repaid, repay your debt to society or to someone else. Do something real that will discharge that guilt. Set up a program for yourself. A lifetime sentence if necessary, if you’re really responsible for a crime that was serious.
Recognize that physical problems have emotional consequences.
Sleep.
Become fully informed about your physical condition.
Don’t let your condition define you.
Get support.
Have appropriate expectations for yourself.
Don’t let anyone push you beyond your limits.
Find ways to take more control of your life.
Look for improvements.
Find the hope.
Emotional energy booster 12: Find something you’re truly interested in that you can always turn to. A flywheel is there to save you whenever your energy runs low
Diagnostic Question 12: Is there something in your life you’re really interested in, and are you pursuing it?
People talk about finding your life’s passion, and that’s great, but from the point of view of emotional energy maybe it’s just a little too grandiose for most of us. Anything that’s hard to find, hard to balance with the rest of your life, can be more intimidating and draining than energizing. So I talk about keeping your flywheel spinning. All that means is that there’s something you’re interested in, that you care about, that gives you emotional energy.
Emotional energy booster 13: Even if you’re ashamed, even if you don’t know whom to turn to, go to someone to get help with whatever problem most troubles you
Diagnostic Question 13: Do you have people you regularly talk to honestly about all the things in your life that really bother you?
My rule of thumb states that everyone has at least one problem he feels he can’t share with anyone.
Emotional energy booster 14: find a way to hook up as often as possible with whatever you consider to be beautiful and wonderful and sublime
Diagnostic Question 14: Is there a gray, bland, dull quality somewhere in your life?
And night thoughts are terribly unhealthy. They make you afraid to go to bed. They taint the rest you need. And you remember them during the day. They’re like waking nightmares with credibility.
First, maintain good sleep hygiene. Go to sleep at the same time every night. Don’t drink alcohol or caffeine before sleep. Don’t go to sleep on a full stomach. Make sure your bedroom is comfortable, dark, and well ventilated. Eating a small amount of complex carbohydrates (like a slice of bread or a couple of cookies or crackers) can help you fall asleep. Follow a restful routine before you go to bed, like taking a bath or reading a book.
The third thing to do, if night thoughts overwhelm you, is to get out of bed and go read a book or magazine. Eat a small amount of carbohydrates. Don’t read for much more than half an hour. The minute you feel yourself getting a little sleepy, go back to bed. You’ll almost certainly find it’s easier to go to sleep without bad thoughts.
Emotional energy booster 15: Don’t give your precious emotional energy to people who drain your emotional energy. Step back from them any way you can.
Diagnostic Question 15: Are there people in your life who more often than not leave you feeling worse when you interact with them?
Emotional energy booster 16: You can always take what you’re going through a little less seriously
Diagnostic Question 16: Are you often upset because things in your life feel out of your control? Is there some part of your life where you keep feeling you’re facing disaster?
Everyone’s nervous and bummed out. Their emotional energy is draining in front of our eyes. Murray makes a speech. His goal is to take the pressure off. The center- piece of his speech is the passionate refrain “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!” Over and over, louder and louder, he says this, and he gets the kids to join him until everyone’s shouting it at the top of their lungs. A crazy thing for him to do? Murray’s speech is actually a very smart move. It’s fun to win. It’s fun to play. But when you’re afraid you’re going to lose, energy gets lost at an alarming rate.
And yet every time you take things seriously, you’re embracing fear, as if that nightmare were your friend. But when you stop taking things so seriously, you heal your relationship with the universe. You do this by seeing the universe as a better place. By taking things less seriously, you actually make the universe a better place. Think of the power you hold in your hands!
The simplest way to lift yourself out of the trap of taking things too seriously is to straightforwardly use the Bill Murray approach. Think about something in your life that’s sucking the emotional energy right out of you. I know it’s a big deal. I understand. But tell yourself it just doesn’t matter. Let go of your sense of the overwhelming seriousness of it all. Whether things turn out one way or another, you will still be all right.
One way to stop taking things so seriously is to embrace today, not tomorrow. You’re losing emotional energy because you’re focusing on how things will turn out in the future. You’ll gain emotional energy when you focus on the present moment. What are you doing right now? How does it feel? How can you make it feel better right now? How would you make this moment that you’re in right now better?
You have to live in the present. It’s the only place where you can make anything good happen. And it’s the only place where you can actually enjoy yourself.
This solution works because part of the process of taking things too seriously is getting caught up in thinking about what other people want. That puts you in a state of overload. You’re taking care of too many people. Focusing on yourself is a way to make things easier on yourself.
Another way people found to stop taking things so seriously is they stopped focusing on the minutiae and paid more attention to the big picture.
Emotional energy booster 17: Get rid of the unfinished business in your life. Just deal with it one way or another. Finish it or forget about it. Make a decision
Diagnostic Question 17: Are there important parts of your life that feel up in the air to you? Do you feel overwhelmed with all the things you think you have to do? Do you feel you’re busy with a lot of stuff that doesn’t mean very much to you?
You’re thinking about the best thing to do, and I say forget it. If you want more emotional energy, just do it.
High-energy people make a decision and move on. The emotionally exhausted stay stuck, unable to decide. And the more unmade decisions they’re dragging around, the more burdened they are and the more emotionally exhausted they are. Every time you can’t make a decision, you’re burdening yourself with all the alternatives you can’t let go of.
The burdens of wanting to make a great decision and of one decision being tangled up with a bunch of others completely paralyze us. We forget one simple thing. Nothing is more important than emotional energy. Nothing destroys emotional energy like a backlog of unmade decisions.
That’s why it’s so important to make decisions. You deal with something and move on. Unfinished business saps energy. It’s emotional clutter.
Now here’s how to get rid of the unfinished business in your life. Never, ever have a to-do list of any sort. If something comes up for you to do, put it in your appointment book in a specific time slot. Eventually all the things you have to do in your life will only be in your appointment book. Everyone who does this feels an immediate surge of emotional energy.
The point is that it all has to be controlled by when you do it, not by what you do. By focusing on when, you’ve completely gotten rid of the emotionally draining overhang of things to do. Either there’s a time for it, or there’s no time for it and it’s gone.
Good love produces enormous emotional energy. Bad love produces emotional exhaustion. And just the way good love is the most powerful promoter of emotional energy, bad love is the most toxic producer of emotional fatigue.
Romantic love exists for the sake of your emotional energy.
Loneliness. When you feel lonely, it hurts your emotional energy. That’s one danger. But when you feel lonely, you’re likely to settle for bad love. That will hurt your emotional energy even more. And that’s an even bigger danger. So what do you do? If you’re on your own, think of it as a time to focus on your relationship with yourself. Discover what you enjoy. Discover how you want to live. Discover what you need.
The more you learn to like yourself and your life, the faster you’ll attract good love. This means that when you’re feeling lonely, instead of filling the void with a stranger while you’re in a vulnerable state, take care of yourself, become less vulnerable, and know that this is the way to find love that’s good for you.
Emotional energy booster 18: Spend some money on yourself in a way that makes you happy and hopeful.
Diagnostic Question 18: Do you have an undercurrent of feeling deprived a lot of the time?
It’s not about indulgence. It’s certainly not about spending more money than you can afford. (Whatever you do, don’t spend more than you can afford; debt drains emotional energy.) Instead, a meaningful splurge is about doing something that changes how you feel about your life in some small way. It’s about setting up a future that makes you feel less deprived.
Emotional energy booster 19: Stop doing things you don’t want to do
Diagnostic Question 19: Do you do most things because someone else has asked you to do them?
Here’s a dirty little secret about people who have plenty of energy, who accomplish wonderful things and feel so alive. People with emotional energy remember to just say no.
Emotional energy booster 20: Find someone to confess your darkest secret to
Diagnostic Question 20: Do you feel burdened by guilt? Do you feel you’ve done something terrible you want to get off your chest?
You should only confess to someone who can offer you understanding and forgiveness. And you should only confess to someone who won’t be hurt by your confession.
Emphasize the positive.
Know where you want to go next.
Have your own agenda.
Success on the job isn’t about what you accomplish for others, it’s about what makes you feel successful for yourself.
Emotional energy booster 21: It doesn’t matter where you’re starting from or what you do. But do something that’ll make you feel you look better
Diagnostic Question 21: Are you happy with your appearance? Have you done something meaningful to make yourself look better?
The key is that you have to do something more than you’ve been doing or something different from what you’ve been doing.
Emotional energy booster 22: Sometimes you really are under pressure. But if you focus on yourself and try to do your unrattled, unflappable best, you’ll be fine
Diagnostic Question 22: Do you feel a lot of pressure in your life?
First, don’t assume that anyone’s putting pressure on you. Maybe someone’s asking you to do something, but who says you’re being asked to do it right away? Who says you have to do it just right? Maybe not. You can check it out. Or you can do it at your own pace and in your own way and see if that’s all right.
Second, even if you are having pressure put on you, who says you have to go along with it? Maybe they’re saying you have to do it now. Why can’t you say “Let me do it later”? Maybe they’re saying you’ve got to do a wonderful job. Why can’t you say “Let me do the best job I can”?
Every time you feel pressure, refuse to participate. That’s the ultimate key to getting the pressure off.
Emotional energy booster 23: The secret of confidence is focusing on what you can control, not on what you can’t.
Diagnostic Question 23: Do you feel you could do more or be more if only you had more confidence?
What unconfident people don’t understand is that no one in the world could possibly feel confident about situations where the outcome is uncertain if all they focus on is the outcome. It’s an iron rule in life. Either the outcome is unlikely—winning the golf tournament, for example—and it’s crazy to feel confident you’ll win. Or the outcome is likely—making a decent cake from a cake mix, for example—and you haven’t really accomplished anything worth feeling confident about. So it never makes sense to focus on the outcome when it comes to confidence.
Emotional energy booster 24: End worry by not thinking about how things might go wrong; instead start thinking about all the ways things will be okay
Diagnostic Question 24: Would you say, “I worry a lot”?
So worry is not about something bad happening. It’s about not knowing what is going to happen. And that’s how we exhaust ourselves. Worry isn’t fear. Worry is a kind of mindless scuttling around. It’s not thinking, but just cycling over the same possibilities as we find ourselves compulsively playing out all the different scenarios.
When you’re worrying you’re saying, “I don’t know how things are going to turn out, but I’m afraid they’re going to turn out badly.” Think about what you’re really doing. You’re focusing on the possible bad outcomes.
If worry is your way of constantly thinking about how things are going to turn out badly, the only way to replace it is with thoughts about how in the end, one way or another, everything’s going to be okay. Maybe everything won’t be perfect. Maybe things won’t turn out exactly the way you wanted. But really, if you look deeply into any of the alternatives you’re facing, you’ll see that you’ll be okay, your life will turn out okay, and just maybe everything will be for the best.
Worry isn’t something that happens to you. Worry is something you do. Worry is thinking about bad outcomes. But because it’s something you do, you can do something different. If you can think about warthogs, you can also think about puppies. If you can think about bad things happening, you can instead think about good things happening or about how the things that will happen will be for the good.
Take a situation you’re worried about. It could be anything. Now ask yourself, “How can I look at this in a more positive way?”
The first ingredient is patient timing. A lot of worry gets taken up with thinking about when something is going to happen.
The second ingredient is being open to a whole spectrum of outcomes. Where we go wrong is getting hung up on wanting one tiny particular outcome.
The third ingredient is trusting your ability to cope. I know, you and I can look back and point to more than one incident that casts doubt on our ability to cope. We panicked and screwed up. But so what?
Emotional energy booster 25: The most magical way to get emotional energy is by giving it: showing your love for the world one person at a time, one patch of ground at a time.
Diagnostic Question 25: Are you feeling low, drained, bitter, and flat these days, as if you’ve broken up with someone you love?
When you tap into your own capacity for generosity, kindness, and goodness, you immediately feel better about yourself as a person.
Second, when you love the world, it loves you back.
Be more affectionate.
Have a be-nice-to-everyone day.
Listen to someone you don’t want to listen to.
Smile.
Help someone.
Show that you appreciate the people in your life.
Every day, before you start out, ask yourself, “How can I be a better person today?”